A very merry Studio Audience Christmas special 2014!

Do you reckon Ai Wei Wei might like a bouncy castle for Christmas? We do. There’s a whopping total of SIX people in this podcast including It’s Nice That Directors Alex Bec and Will Hudson, and boy is it hectic. In it we discuss the creative world in 2014, the year gone by and the one approaching us, and tales of Rob going to church when he was little. Sound good? It’s better. Merry Christmas from the whole It’s Nice That team, and we will see you on the other side for more Studio Audience!

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Gather round, charge your glasses and pin back those ears, the pod is back with an elongated episode in which we touch on all manner of art and design extravagance. In the first section we talk about the sumptuous new Seymour Chwast archive, the success of this kind of Photoshop project and i-D’s 18-cover 35th anniversary issue.

Certain things signal that we’ve broken the back of the week – the intensification of social plans, the sing-song siren call of the weekend and the arrival of our Studio Audience podcast. This week we’re taking on all the big issues (in a specific art and design context) – including Grayson Perry’s Dream House project, Airbnb floating a 70-tonne house down the Thames (plus backlash!) and this year’s Designs of the Year category winners.

The It’s Nice That podcast spins around each week with alarming regularity but lo and behold it’s back again with a special twist. With two Studio Audience stalwarts Liv Siddall and James Cartwright leaving us this week we took the chance to look back at some of the creative highlights of their time here. We also take a quick spin through the art and design news, touching on The Onion’s recent redesign and its brilliant explanatory essay, plus the new-look Esquire, David Hockney’s take on Twitter, the brilliant new Christoph Niemann show of pencil drawings and our Graduates scheme 2015!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but where the It’s Nice That podcast is concerned, it’s the words that are doing all the leg work. Come with us into the thicket of this week’s offering and see what art and design treats we have in store. We look at JR’s cover for The New York Times Magazine plus Anorak’snew venture and an interesting project from Vangardist Magazine to tackle HIV stigma.

Realist methods in painting often strive for a photographic quality, leaving the viewer amazed and disconcerted by the uncanny closeness to reality. In the photography of Ruud van Empel, however, this trope is inverted. Rather than creating photo-realism within painting, Ruud constructs a kind of photo-artificialism with his photographs that verge on the painterly. In other words, where you might look at a painting by Chuck Close and mistake it for a photograph, you’re likely to take Ruud’s photographs for paintings.

Fashion photography with a pinch of the documentary; photographer Grant James-Thomas stumbled into the hybrid genre of travel fashion photography as a 17-year-old. Growing up on a farm in Wales, he found himself (just a few short years later) shooting for Vogue. Since then he’s travelled the world, photographing editorials in locations ranging from Kenya and Vietnam to Costa Rica, eventually settling in London but continuing to experiment with all kinds of photographic styles and subjects.

Stiya by Cole Barash is a high stylised sequence of images, recently released as a photo book at LA Art Bookfair, published by Deadbeat Club. A dual series, it tells the story of two events – a storm and the birth of his first child – both which lasted for four days. It’s a book which utilises Cole’s idiosyncratic “hyper-focused” method of photography to closely examine the similarities between the two events, comparing them as spaces exclusive to the elements and ubiquitous with change, seclusion and energy.

We all feel lonely from time to time. For some of us, the working hours are the loneliest time of the day especially for some freelancers spending hour after hour tucked away in a studio grafting away at a commission. For the Seoul-based illustrator known as Nano, these emotions are worth portraying, beautifully expressing loneliness in new series of illustrations she’s titled The Lonely People.

Over in Oslo, Norway, Jan Hakon Erichsen has been establishing what can only be described as a very unique artistic practice. Describing himself as a “visual artist and balloon destroyer,” Jan’s work also comes with a disclaimer: “You should really, really not try this at home.”

Having studied at Korean design college Paju Typography Institute, and with a further degree in visual communication from Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst in Basel, Seoul-based graphic designer Son Ayong has a pretty good idea of how to capture and convey concepts by paying close attention to form, line and colour in text and image. Her bold poster designs draw on elements of illustration and web-based graphic works to create visual identities that reflect the overarching themes running through exhibitions, programmes, films, festivals, workshops and seminars.

Korean American graphic designer HeeJae Kim’s portfolio is one full of colour and personality. While some familiar elements do appear across his designs, HeeJae’s work is always underpinned by an attitude towards graphic design that sees typographic elements handled in an illustrative manner, a fact that’s inspired by his initial studies in illustration.

Whether or not to study a postgraduate degree in the arts is a question pretty much every undergraduate will ask themselves. But it is a pertinent question particularly within the arts, as the option to spend a few more years developing as a creative is tempting.

A self-confessed “egoist photographer who’s obsessed by his personal aesthetic research”, Leonardo Scotti first began taking pictures as part of the subway graffiti scene in Milan and wider Europe, pursuing personal projects and self-publishing them in the form of photo-zines. Over the past few years, as he’s begun to integrate the ways he approaches commissions and personal work, his practice has evolved to incorporate fashion photography. He tells us: “I found the balance between work and my personal imagery”, which has resulted in fashion shoots that pay close attention to artistic composition, as well as personal work which draws on elements of fashion styling.

Raid is a new publication by Irish graphic designer and developer Simon Sweeney. Currently based in Munich though “leaving for somewhere else in July” (very mysterious), Raid is a unique magazine as it stemmed from the never-ending stream of potential ideas that is a Slack channel. Featuring a host of exciting designers, Raid asks its contributors to imagine a game, and then design its logo.

As a young man, Kazuhiro Aihara dreamt of being a professional snowboarder and was well on his way to making that dream a reality, when all of a sudden it didn’t materialise for a number of reasons. “I felt absolutely defeated in my life,” the Tokyo-based graphic designer tells It’s Nice That. “Around that time, I realised I loved creating graphic designs and, along with snowboarding, I started designing a few different things for fashion and music flyers.”

“Looking back now, I guess my decision to get into graphic design has a lot to do with the fact that I was obsessed with MTV, music magazines, CD artworks, etc as a teenager,” says Felipe Rocha, a Brazilian designer and art director based in New York City. “My dream was to be closer to this ‘world’, and to me, design was the way to get there.”

One of our Ones to Watch 2018, illustrator Jeffrey Cheung has delighted us once again with a new publication of paintings and drawings. The book features his signature energetic nude figures, set forth in vibrant colours, with a touching innocence and simplicity of style. He says of his art: “Over the past few years, my practice has shifted from zines to painting canvas, and decks for queer and trans skateboarders. My practice is fluctuating and has become more involved with creating community space and how my visual art can be used to uplift others.”

“Anderson shelters, used condoms, buried Victorian tannic acid bottles, discarded ring-pull cans, tarmac, railway engineers in high-viz jackets, men in tracksuits, men in dinner suits.” These are just a few of the things that Daniel Soars considers “the essential signs of England,” in a recent piece on Max Porter’s recently-published novel Lanny. These are the signs that pop up throughout Lanny like old Barbara Cartland paperbacks at a Sunday morning car-boot sale. Soars could also be describing the images and atmospheres compiled in photographer Ian Howorth’s latest collection.

Nepalese photographer Uma Bista dedicates her work to addressing issues of gender inequality in South Asia, and raising awareness about the difficulties that women face in their daily lives under the systemic enforcement of patriarchal values and traditions. Having graduated from the International Photography Programme run by Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she now works in Kathmandu as a deputy photo editor at Annapurna Post, a Nepalese daily newspaper.

Tess Smith-Roberts is an illustrator in her final year at Kingston School of Art. Originally from Norwich, she uses bright, bold colour and simple compositions to tells stories, her characters never complete without two black dots for eyes, and a straight line for lips.

“All my typefaces have feminist concepts or thoughts woven into them," says the type and graphic designer Charlotte Rohde. Based out of Amsterdam but having studied in Düsseldorf where the typography is usually very bold – “almost brutal but playful at the same time” – Charlotte’s designs visibly encapsulate the place where she studied while hinting at feminism which adds an emotional value to the text.

Haeri Chung, otherwise known as Super Salad (fantastic name, we know) is a Seoul-based graphic designer mainly working in print. She also founded an independent publishers called Super Salad Stuff which is where her nickname comes from, and where she compiles all her self-initiated projects as a way to keep them alive and healthy. Contributing these self-published publications to art and books fairs every year, she also distributes free papers on a wide range of topics from the subject of how to tie different knots, to documenting the inherent design applied to air mail.

Even if you have attended any kind of sports game in the Massachusetts area recently, chances are you probably haven’t spotted the photographer Pelle Cass. His images, on the other hand, would be pretty difficult to overlook.

Caricom is the magazine using football’s ability to encourage a sense of community among fans of differing backgrounds to tackle subjects absent from mainstream sports media. In particular, it recognises the need to see “football and fan culture examined through the under-explored lens of the black experience in Great Britain and beyond”. Founded by writer Calum Jacobs and Shawn Sawyers, Caricom is now in its second issue; a more refined, more diverse and even more celebratory issue.

“Imagine a time where nature and civilisation are engaged in the ultimate power struggle… Who will reign supreme? Who will achieve destruction on a level never imagined?” So speaks the narrator in the script for a virtual reality game interrogating the threat and fear of climate change, dreamt up by California-based visual artist Veronica Graham. In her new Risograph-printed publication, NAT vs CIV, self-published under the moniker Most Ancient, Veronica creates a series of storyboards that envision how the game will play out in its digitised form.

When Jieun Lee and a group of her friends traveled to Australia last year, the Suwon-based illustrator took the opportunity to paint the “good and warm” urban landscapes she vividly remembers. “These are the places where I fell in love with traveling," she tells It’s Nice That. Photographing a bank imagery that signify these feelings, Jieun then started painting from these photographs once she was back in Korea, adding a dash of Hockney’s colour palette to the charming paintings.

China’s biggest city, Shanghai, located on the country’s central coast and most well known for its global buzz in the finance world, is now also tackling the wonderful world of independent publishing through the Shanghai Art Book Fair.

Welcome to the first in a new series we’re launching here at It’s Nice That. Called Double Click, each month it will bring you a round-up of some of our favourite websites and digital designs floating around out there on the world wide web. Whether they employ lateral thinking to show us a new way of navigating a site, use animation to enhance the reading experience, or feature some downright bonkers interactions, we’ll be chatting to the creators of each site to find out more about the thinking that went into the design.

It’s not every day that a successful global fashion brand allows itself and its message to be interpreted by someone from outside the company. But that’s exactly what Paul Smith has done with a wonderfully weird new book, created by James Theseus Buck and Luke Brooks, otherwise known as Rottingdean Bazaar.

The last time we wrote about illustrator and animator Dylan Jones, we were fascinated by the mysterious figure calling himself Hologram Ceiling and producing fantastically absurd, squiggly drawings on coloured paper in bright pastels and pencil. Since then, Dylan has produced three mini publications with Gridlords, as well as continuing to create his signature bizarre, hallucinatory illustrations, which take our weirdest fantasies and reflect them back at us in a funhouse mirror.

Photographer Dustin Thierry, born on the Caribbean island of Curaçao, is now based in Amsterdam where he uses his camera to bolster communities he is both a part of, and feels a responsibility towards. Working on long-term projects, his images are sensitive and full of joy, not to mention beautiful, and tackle themes surrounding race, gender, sexuality, and vulnerable minorities.

Part magazine, part photo book, Bill is an annual photography publication by Roma which describes its initiative as “prioritising visual reading without distraction”. With editing and creative direction by graphic designer Julie Peeters, Bill collates new or unpublished work from 12 contributing photographers and presents the images with no accompanying text, upholding the capacity of pictures to speak for themselves.

Welcome to the first of our brand new series, In Conversation, a new fortnightly interview with a leading light from the world of creativity. Every other Monday, we’ll publish a new Q&A here on It’s Nice That. Today, for the first instalment, we chat to Los Angeles-based German artist Thomas Demand.

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